Broadband News

Openreach to launch 10 Gigabit cablelink in October

As the GEA product range is getting larger and probably as a pre-cursor to the larger G.fast trials Openreach has notified communication providers that as of 24th October they will be able to order a 10 Gigabit Ethernet cablelink in the handover exchanges.

Current cablelink handovers are 1 Gbps in size, and separate links are needed for VDSL2 and FTTP customers, the new link allows data from connections to be passed onto the broadband providers hardware in the exchange over the same link. Importantly the price is not 10 times that of the 1 Gbps link but five times the cost i.e. the 1 Gbps link is a one-off charge of £2,000 and the 10 Gbps one is £10,000 and also supports multi-cast. On smaller exchanges the Openreach fibre connectivity usually runs back to a larger exchange, therefore aggregating the number of customers into a more economic size and avoiding costly handover node builds at every exchange.

It is thought that the extra costs due to the previous need for a duplicate cablelink and the fairly small number of Openreach GEA-FTTP connections were core reasons why providers such as Sky, TalkTalk, Vodafone and others have not offered the GEA-FTTP product range to date. This set of changes may change that, only time will tell.